exported data from boujou not pasting into AE

[Jan Sherlink]

Install the Boujou.aex filter in you AE Plug-In folder,
you can download it from the 2d3 website or export as Maya file

cya,

Jan

[Michael Goldberg]

Hi Jan,
Actually, I’m not trying to import the camera from boujou. In fact the shot we have does not have a successful solve. what I want to do is export 1 individual track, and paste that into the position parameter of a layer in ae. I can export individual tracks from boujou, but it won’t paste the data into ae.

Mike

[Jan Sherlink]

I don’t know Boujou that well,
but Boujou doesn’t track objects, it tracks the camera.
Even if you get a good solve, elements in your scene won’t have position-data but reference points in your 3D scene.
So … i think … there’s nothing to paste..
and again i could be wrong

cya,

Jan

[Michael Goldberg]

Hi Jan,
Boujou tracks 2d points in your scene. From these scenes, it calculates where it thinks the camera is on each frame. If it can do this, you end up with a good camera solve, and then can import the camera into your 3D or compositing program. You can export the 2D tracks as a text file with X and Y data for each frame. The tracking is much better than AE. I end up with a text file with position data. What I want to do is paste this position data into an AE layer’s position, and it’s not working. Mocha exports a text file that you can paste into AE, and it does work. I thought someone might have run into a similar situation.

Mike

[Jan Sherlink]

Now i see it,
if you copy keyframe data from AE to a textfile and compare it with the boujou-textfile, you can see there’s a difference in text-formatting.
If you’re lucky, some whiz at aenhancers.com might write an import script…
Since I’m a complete noob at scripts I didn’t succeed in writing it myself 🙁 strange that it doesn’t exists already

cya,

Jan

[Michael Goldberg]

Hi Jan,
I found this document on adobe’s web site, and this helped identify where the problems were in the exported text file. Essentially I opened the text file in Excel, created a new column, cleaned up a few stray numbers, and deleted the name of the track. Once I did this, everything lined up correctly, and it imported correctly into AE. The boujou track is so much better than AE built in tracker, and worked like a gem for this particular purpose.

Mike

https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WS98BCDDB7-89CB-49cb-B94D-6CEB6CED4462.html

[Jonathan Wiley]

Hey Mike,

I was struggling with the same issue recently. It caused me to check out SynthEyes as an alternative, which ended up giving me a properly formated .txt file for the paste. Here’s how it was formated:

Adobe After Effects 6.5 Keyframe Data

Units Per Second 30
Source Width 1920
Source Height 1080
Source Pixel Aspect Ratio 1
Comp Pixel Aspect Ratio 1

Position
Frame X pixels Y pixels Z pixels
0 1145.59 454.86 0
1 1145.39 454.18 0
2 1145.35 454.59 0

I’ll still continue using boujou as it works best with Cinema 4D, but I have to admit I was very impressed with SynthEyes as an (much less expensive) alternative and will probably purchase a copy sometime in the future to replace my AE tracker as AE’s tracker is just about worthless to me.

– Jon